Friday, June 20, 2014

Fundraiser Day Two: Today In Ongoing "We Fucking Told You So" Team Coverage...

Longtime readers of know that while we here at the driftglass blog strive to maintain a levels of technical, graphic and authorial quality which meets or exceeds those of other sites with budgets 100,000 times larger than ours, sometimes we have to cut corners. For example, you might not know that in order to provide our readers with as close to cutting-edge Ramesh Ponnuru coverage as we can afford, we have had to outsource that beat to an itty-bitty, off-shore division staffed with drunks and layabouts so that we can bring you an irregular feature called "Ramesh Ponnuru's Wingnut Purity Creds to Expire". Unfortunately, this has often amounted me having to yell at them to off their their lazy asses every now and then and check the meat thermometer on Mr. Ponnuru's stealthy, deliberate transition from "the smirky little weasel who wrote 'The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life'" to a Very Serious Conservative Thinker who Thinks Very Serious Conservative Thoughts.

For Money.

Of course carry out his bold plan to sidle on over to the David Brooks side of the S.S. Conservative Obtusitania, from time to time Young Ramesh has to...well..."steal" is a harsh word, so let's just say it has been rumored that from time to time he wire-drops into Liberal Central Command

in order to "liberate" some of our time-honored observations about Conservatism without leaving any finger-prints.

(Needless to say, Liberals realize when they have, once again, been jacked without so much as a 'Thank you' or by-your-leave, but who the fuck pays attention to those losers anyway? As one of their more disreputable members observed long ago,

...

Finally, at no point during this latest reshuffling of America's Conservative media courtiers will anyone be gauche enough to mention that the Filthy Liberals were, once again, absolutely right all along.

Still, over here in the cultural ghetto of Liberal Central Command, we will all laugh and drink our chardonnay and laugh some more.)

And speaking of Young Ramesh and our media's gentlemen's agreement to never notice when Liberals are once again shown to have been absolutely right all along...here's a lovely little bit of awesome from a few weeks ago which my surly, drunken, good-for-nothing staff did not call to my attention until now:

The Tea Party Never Existed

MAY 21, 2014 4:34 PM EDT

By Ramesh Ponnuru

Much of journalism consists, G.K. Chesterton wrote, of "saying Lord Jones is dead to people who never knew Lord Jones was alive." Much of political journalism this week consists of people who have not understood the Tea Party since its birth saying that it's now dead.

The loosely organized movement arose as a reaction to the reigning liberalism of 2009 and 2010, just as previous liberal moments in the mid-1960s, late 1970s and early 1990s brought about conservative backlashes. It was also, in part, a retrospective reaction by conservatives to compromises they had made during George W. Bush's years in the White House. This, too, is a fairly normal feature of political life: Purification is always easier when your side is out of power.

And just as the intra-Democratic conflicts of the Bush years -- think of the 2006 Ned Lamont-Joe Lieberman Senate primary in Connecticut, for example, itself a retrospective reaction to the party's moderation during Bill Clinton's administration -- didn't lead to lasting schism, so the Republican factionalism of recent years seems to be fading away.

This was predictable and, for that matter, predicted. In early 2010, Kate O'Beirne and I looked at detailed polling of Tea Party attitudes for the National Review. We argued that unifying the Republican Party would be easier than it was when Christian conservatives or supporters of Ross Perot joined the coalition: Unlike those earlier groups, Tea Party advocates already believed the same things that regular Republicans did. They basically were regular Republicans, just, if you will, more so.

The differences between the Tea Party and "establishment Republicans" have largely concerned style and attitude rather than program and ideology, and these are easily finessed -- especially because moods change.

...

Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader whom self-proclaimed spokesmen for the Tea Party have loudly denounced, almost certainly won most Kentucky Republicans who consider themselves Tea Partiers in his re-election primary this week. Some of the denouncers are warning that McConnell will lose in November unless he gets his challenger's Tea Party supporters to turn his way. Some of those supporters tell pollsters they're so disgusted with McConnell that they'll back his Democratic opponent. They won't.

That's not because the Tea Party movement is dead. It's because the movement the pundits imagined -- a bitter enemy of the existing, pretty conservative Republican Party -- was never truly alive.

If you are masochistic enough to take a trip down that most despised thoroughfare in American politics -- Memory Lane -- all the way to origins of the "Tea Party" myth, you will fine no one but Filthy Liberals, yelling impotently at the Mainstream Media Behemoth that this was obviously another Republican lie:

...based on simple observation, guess who appears to be the largest group of late-blooming independents?

Those fucknozzles who, after giving Dubya the longest tongue bath in modern political history while calling everyone else a traitor, started gagging on the sheer tonnage of bullshit their creepy idolatry of George W. Bush was requiring them to swallow and obediently regurgitate every fucking day, that's who.

Most newly minted “independents” seem to be little more than Republicans who are fleeing the scene of their crime, but at the same time still desperately want believe in the inerrant wisdom of Rush Limbaugh. They are completely incapable of facing the horrifying reality that that they have gotten every single major political opinion and decision of their adult lives completely wrong, so instead they double-down on their hatred of women and/or gays and/or brown people and/or Liberals, and blame them for the miserable fuckpit their leaders and their policies have made of their live and futures.

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin, they have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

But they fool no one.

Except, apparently, David Fucking Brooks.

Nothing but a cheap a gimmick by and for Republicans frantically trying to escape accountability for the catastrophe piled atop catastrophe that they had just spent eight unleashing on the country.

The thing is, I don't especially begrudge these Four Heist Men of the Teapocalypse their ludicrous little charade; Hell, if I'd spent the last decade happily sucking the dicks of the people who destroyed my country, I'd guess I'd be dressing up in pantyhose and jaunty little hats and pretending I'd been asleep since the Ford Administration too.

Phil Ponce, on the other hand, is a different story. Letting these clowns use the the public airwaves to put across their underhanded, one-sided scam is unforgivable, and letting himself be used as their sweat rag in the process is beyond embarrassing.

If Royko were alive, he'd be dangling Ponce by his ankle from a fifth story window right about now, making him conjugate the verb "muckrake".

In Latin.

Backwards.

Else how's that boy ever gonna learn!

Sadly these observations from 2009 and 2010 were all written by a Liberal.